Fascinating email from 2003 where Alan Kay defines his 1967 coinage of "object oriented" programming.
It is surprising to me how difficult it has been (for me, and I'm sure others as well) to grasp this whole way of thinking. You can hear Kay having this same struggle on a different level when he says "I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then...."
I'm starting to "get it" though. The key to making progress towards understanding is to have the right problem. When my program (which I call Geneva because that's where I had the main idea) was smaller I had no way to grasp what all the fuss was about object orientation. But now that it is much larger, and in some ways unwieldy and even a little bit out of control, I've begun to actually understand (rather than just being able to recite some rote definition of OO.) Having the right problem to carry you through to understanding is key, in the sense that real understanding is similar to discovering the concept for the first time. And you can't discover something if you're not working on a problem.
You learn what you need to know, I guess, and by definition no more. Anyway, back to work.
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It is surprising to me how difficult it has been (for me, and I'm sure others as well) to grasp this whole way of thinking. You can hear Kay having this same struggle on a different level when he says "I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then...."
I'm starting to "get it" though. The key to making progress towards understanding is to have the right problem. When my program (which I call Geneva because that's where I had the main idea) was smaller I had no way to grasp what all the fuss was about object orientation. But now that it is much larger, and in some ways unwieldy and even a little bit out of control, I've begun to actually understand (rather than just being able to recite some rote definition of OO.) Having the right problem to carry you through to understanding is key, in the sense that real understanding is similar to discovering the concept for the first time. And you can't discover something if you're not working on a problem.
You learn what you need to know, I guess, and by definition no more. Anyway, back to work.
- jim 11-07-2007 6:33 pm